My fans don't understand what I'm singing

(From a teen magazine, KP, 1999.)

Do you know who Jasmin Wagner is?
No, I didn't think so. But maybe Blümchen? KP has met with her.

It's just the friends in Hamburg that know Jasmin Wagner.

Everyone else knows her as Blümchen, the singer that sings hit after hit - in German.

Music producers discovered Jasmin when she sang at a party. She was 14 years old then. Already after a year, Jasmin, who used the artist name Blümchen, got her first song on the top lists.

Jasmin, who has been singing whole her life, never thought of being a star. Suddenly she was on TV-shows and all different kinds of magazines.

But her best memory from her childhood is not selling hundreds of thousands of records; it's her first weekly allowance.

"I was 10 years old and it was fabulous. I finally got to decide what to buy myself. But mostly I bought unnecessary stuff, like toys and candy."

What do her songs mean?

Most people in the music business shook their heads when they heard that she was going to sing in German. "It sounds too angular". "To sing in German will only work in Germany," they said.

The people who write Blümchen's songs didn't care about that and she was very successful, in Sweden among other countries.

"You can do great songs in all languages, even in German," Jasmin says.

But most of her fans don't understand what she's singing. Two of her most popular songs are "Ich Bin Wieder Hier" and "Heut' Ist Mein Tag". They mean "I am here again" and "Today is my day."

"It doesn't matter that they don't understand," Jasmin says. "Music is a feeling. When I was 9 years old and listened to Roxette, I had no idea what they were singing, but I still knew that it was something that I liked."

She's called Blossom in Asia

Like most artists, Blümchen likes singing and performing more than doing interviews. She is tired and answers a little absent to KP's questions. But to sell records, an artist must be willing to travel all around the world to do interviews and be a part of TV shows.

Jasmin's happy and fast techno-music also is successful in Asia. But she is called Blossom there, not Blümchen. In the songs that sell in Asia, she's singing in English.

"But I don't want to sing in English anymore. I don't like it. You lose so much when you translate the lyrics from German to English."

Jasmin will soon travel to the U.S.A. where her album might start to sell--with songs in German. Not many people think she'll make it.

But Jasmin has made her choice. If she's going to make it, she will make it in German.

And she has made another promise: she will never sing in Swedish.

"That would sound terrible!"